2 25223923024025026080th Congress109th Congress(Projected)Introduction:The second session of the 109thCongress is set to spend the least amount of time in Washington of any Congress since the second session of the 80thCongress of 1947-48. The House of Representatives is projected to meet for only 99 daysin session, nine days fewer than in 1948. The Senate will wrap up business on the same day as the House, October 6th. The Senate is projected to meet for 129 days, tying the sixth fewest days a Senate session has met since 1948. The data in this report indicates that this year has produced two of the least convened sessions of Congress since the end of World War II. The House of Representatives:Since 1947 only 16 sessions of Congress have met for less than 130 days. This year the House of Representatives scheduled a mere 88 days in session. At least 23 of those days have votes occurring after 5:30 or 6:30 pm with one voting day ending at 2 pm for Rosh Hashanah. Twelve of these 23 postponed voting days occur on a Monday or a Tuesday following a Monday off. This allows members to come in late on Mondays or Tuesdays just in time to cast a vote. There are also 37 days with no votes on the calendar. Congress has so far failed to meet for 23 of those 37 “no vote” days with four “no vote” days remaining. Of the ten “no vote” days that the House has met, nine of them lasted for no more than 11 minutes. Fewer than one-out-of-three “no vote” days become a day in session. So far, the House has met for 84 days. Adding up the days left in their schedule (16 days) – and calculating that every one-out-of-three “No Votes Scheduled” days will become a day in session – the projected number of days in session for this second session of the 109thHouse of Representatives is 99 days(all calculations in this report use this projected number). The 99 days far surpasses the second session of the 80thHouse as the least convened session of Congress in the post-war era.

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TERMSpring '07

PROFESSORSHEFTER, M

TAGS
United States Congress, Prime number, United States Senate, United States House of Representatives